One day in Norcia, Casella and I had lunch with Father Cassian, the prior of the Benedictine monastic community, the hometown of St. Benedict. Father Cassian is an American who founded the community in 1998, and moved them to this monastery in 2000. It had been emptied out in 1810 by the Napoleonic laws, but now, there are once again monks living in it.
Over the course of our lunch, I had the opportunity to mention the Benedict Option to Father Cassian. I told him it had to do with the final paragraph of Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, which he indicated he understood. I said that I’m not talking about everybody running for the hills and living in an armed compound, but I am talking about forming communities within which we can make meaningful withdrawals from an increasingly hostile, increasingly chaotic society. The idea, I told him, is to be able to hold on to our knowledge and tradition in a dark time.
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